Food fight

Jeffrey Chodorow, the sour restaurant mogul who was portrayed as the heavy in the Rocco-DiSpirito-flames-out reality series “The Restaurant,” takes umbrage at a recent New York Times dining review of his latest theme restaurant, Kobe Club, in a 1,000-word letter to the paper.

To guarantee people would see how serious and seriously peeved he is, Chodorow paid a fortune (estimates range from $83,000 to $115,000) to reprint the letter on a full-page ad in the Dining In/Dining Out section of today’s NY Times.

He’s furious about the review, by chief dining critic Frank Bruni, who was entertainingly nasty in his assessment. After noting the decor includes 2,000 samurai swords hanging from the ceiling, long strips of leather acting as canopies and screens, and walls of black-painted bricks strung with chains, Bruni cracks, “If Akira Kurosawa hired the Marquis de Sade as an interior decorator, he might end up with a gloomy rec room like this.”

What’s most curious about Chodorow’s letter is his claim that the review was “as much or more about me than it was the restaurant.”

This is plainly untrue. The review runs to 1,136 words; Chodorow’s name appears four times, in paragraphs 4-8 of a 29-paragraph review. The restaurant comes off much worse than its owner.

It’s a fun spat, and one that promises to be ongoing: Though he claims to be “too successful and battle-hardened to be affected” by Bruni’s review, Chodorow has started his own blog specifically to rebut the reviews of Bruni and Adam Platt of New York magazine. (There’s little on the blog yet, but you can see a PDF of the full-page ad there.)